In recent years, a combination of regulatory reforms, market structure evolution and technology innovation have combined to create a new paradigm for the global financial trading markets; one in which the speed at which transactions can be executed is fundamental to the success of market participants.
Put simply, for such a participant—be it an exchange operator, a broker or a trading firm—to win in the new electronic marketplace of complex algorithmic and high-frequency trading (HFT), they have to be faster than their competition. And the margin that separates the winners from the losers is now measured in microseconds, with nanoseconds not too far off.
Within the Information Technology (IT) platforms upon which financial trading systems run, the speed at which data can be processed and exchanged between components directly affects the efficiency and overall speed of those systems. And the phenomenon that limits this speed is known as latency. Minimizing latency—to a point where it is close to eradicated—is the design goal for these platforms.
But it is a design goal that is very challenging to meet. Latency is introduced by every component of the platform, be it the microprocessors, memory and I/O buses that make up servers, the network interfaces and cabling that form local data fabrics, the fiber optics that connect geographically dispersed processing endpoints. Latency is also introduced by the processing involved in executing the trading application logic itself.
Thus, the overall latency of an IT platform is the sum of many contributors, including the vital messaging function or layer that binds the servers and networks—and the application logic—together.
The present patent application discloses a novel technology configured to extend the path length for transmission of digital radio information using repeaters while minimizing data transfer latency.